Thousands will descend on Dealey Plaza in November for the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But one of the most intriguing sites related to the tragedy is 95 miles south, tucked away at Baylor University in Waco.

The W.R. Poage Legislative Library contains a JFK assassination archive that is quietly growing into one of the nation’s premier collections.

In recent years, more than a dozen researchers, authors and experts on the assassination have donated work accumulated over their lifetimes. The files include hundreds of thousands of public documents, photos, recordings, reel-to-reel films and other materials about the tragedy and subsequent investigation — or, depending on your point of view, government cover-up.

In 2012, the Poage Library scored several major acquisitions, including a shipment of 103 boxes of materials from the Mary Ferrell Foundation, named for the Dallas legal secretary who was considered a central figure among JFK assassination experts. By the time of her death in 2004, she had amassed a large database on the subject, including more than 40,000 index cards with names and details that she eventually computerized.

“They’ve certainly been active the last few years in building up this JFK collection,” said Rex Bradford, president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, based in Ipswich, Mass. He is a computer software expert who created the foundation’s popular online resource (www.maryferrell.org). He arranged for the donation to Baylor because much of the material could not be scanned and put online.

“I was still sitting on literally a houseful of Mary’s materials she had collected over a lifetime,” including personal letters, books and thousands of newspaper clippings, Bradford said.

Gary Shaw, a Cleburne architect and author who has researched the Kennedy assassination since the 1960s, said other places make Kennedy materials available online. But the Poage Library is distinctive because it is also an archive that preserves and protects the materials, as well as making them publicly available.

“This is a well-funded and well-run place,” said Shaw, who has placed part of his extensive research collection with the Poage. “What’s the use of putting anything [someplace else] if it’s going to walk out the door or rot?”

One of several libraries at Baylor, Poage is a two-story, 25,000-square-foot building. It opened in 1979 and houses extensive political materials. The library includes the papers of a dozen U.S. representatives from Texas, including Rep. William R. “Bob” Poage, a Democrat who served in Congress for 42 years. The library also holds the papers of former Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock.

Other Dallas-area university libraries and institutions, including The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, have JFK-related materials. Most are focused on one or two singular collections. For example, Texas Christian University has the Marguerite Oswald Collection, the papers and documents of the accused assassin’s mother.

Passing generation

Many longtime Kennedy assassination researchers have died or are nearing the end of their lives. They or their estates are looking for a permanent home to store their research materials for future generations, said Ben Rogers, the Poage’s director and archivist.

“We wanted to create something that people could use,” Rogers said. “There didn’t seem to be another place that could handle this material archivally.”

Many of the researchers in the Poage collection disputed the 1964 findings by the Warren Commission, the federal government’s official investigation concluding that the assassination was the work of a lone gunman.

Rogers thinks many of these citizen investigations were spurred on by a 1979 report by the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations “that left the door open to a conspiracy,” he said.

The JFK collection began in 2004, when Rogers acquired the papers of the late Penn Jones Jr., the former publisher of the Midlothian Mirror and a legendary skeptic of the government’s investigation. Jones spent the last 35 years of his life trying to prove the assassination was a conspiracy.

In addition to the Penn Jones collection, the library also has the work of Jack White, a photographer who consulted for the House Select Committee on Assassinations and the Oliver Stone film JFK.

Wherever possible, the material is made available to the public online. The library has a public electronic archive accessible at www.baylor.edu/lib/poage/jfk/.

All materials in the archives are cataloged and protected in acid-free envelopes — a time-consuming process that relies heavily on the help of Baylor students. It took four years just to process the Penn Jones collection, Rogers said.

Oswald photos

The library also recently received a set of rare photographs, thought to be lost to history for more than four decades. The photos show Parkland Memorial Hospital’s ER doctors trying to save Lee Harvey Oswald, after he was gunned down by Jack Ruby.

In 2004, Shaw, the Cleburne architect, received nine rolls of undeveloped film from a retired Parkland hospital administrator. The film had been taken two days after the assassination, when Oswald was undergoing emergency surgery after being shot by Ruby.

The film, which was taken by a Parkland doctor, was kept by the Parkland administrator for more than 40 years. Most of the film had deteriorated, but Shaw managed to salvage a few photos, which can be seen on the Poage’s website and in person at the library.

Shaw says the fact that the photos went undeveloped for so long underscores the incompetence of investigation into Kennedy’s death. “In my opinion, it’s a piece of history that is 90 percent lost because of the ineptitude of the entire authority apparatus,” including the Dallas police, county Sheriff’s Department, the FBI and the Warren Commission, Shaw said. “The reason why is, they didn’t want to know what happened,” he said.

The Poage Library does not take a stand on the issue of whether the Kennedy assassination was the work of a lone gunman or a conspiracy, Rogers said.

“It wasn’t our intent to be a counter to the Warren Commission,” he said. “Our intent was simply to amplify our political collection.”

AT A GLANCE: JFK Resource Consortium

In November, The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza launched the JFK Resource Consortium, a Web portal with links to various JFK-related collections and archives around Texas. Along with Baylor University’s Poage Library, the site includes links to two dozen institutions, including many universities in North Texas.

Each institution has something different to offer researchers pursuing an angle on the Kennedy assassination, said Krishna Shenoy, librarian of The Reading Room at the Sixth Floor Museum.

The DeGolyer Library at SMU includes the papers of civic leader Stanley Marcus and Earle Cabell, the mayor of Dallas at the time of the assassination. “If you want to know what the city was like at the time, you’d want to go there,” Shenoy said.

The Sixth Floor Museum is also an archival and research institution, Shenoy said. “We have over 40,000 items in the museum collection, including over 1,000 oral histories, and 5,500 in the library collection.” To learn more, visit http://www.jfk.org/go/reading-room/consortium.

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